Nokia Laptops: Coming Soon

Another sign of the converging road ahead for laptops and mobiles! Nokia has affirmed that they are considering entering the Laptop market. When asked of Nokia’s possible plans to start manufacturing laptops, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo reportedly said, "We are looking very actively also at this opportunity”.

Why shouldn’t they? Laptops are getting smaller and integrating more and more features of mobiles, while mobile are gaining more and more features of computers. With Nokia smartphones already capable of email, web browsing, video streaming, editing documents, and much, much more, laptops are just a stone throw away.

Nokia’s unique experience in making mobile phones in a small form factor, and packing them to the brim with features, is one that will surely come to play in a big way. Many of Nokia’s higher end devices such as the E90 communicator are essentially trimmed down PC’s in their own right.

Recently Nokia entered the software by acquiring Trolltech, the company responsible for developing the Qt Toolkit which is widely used for developing software for Windows, MacOs and Linux, the most famous of them being the KDE Desktop environment for Linux. They have also recently acquired and open sourced the Symbian Operating System that is used on their phones. A version of Qt for developing application for Symbian is also underway. It is quite possible then that their Laptops might feature a expanded version of their Symbian operating system.

We have seen a lot of computer manufacturers, such as HP, Lenovo, and Acer starting their own line of mobile phone recently, and Dell too is considering the option. As such Nokia deciding to expand to the Laptop market isn’t quite so unusual.

Nokia already has a large loyal customer base, and its products are widely considered to be of superior quality, sturdy, and stable. They have a ready distribution network, and have large ready supply chain and manufacturing capacity, which they can use to gain foothold, and emerge successfully in the field.